Britain’t Got Talent should be using it’s time slot to promote real variety acts. The ones who live outside the rock star limelight afforded to song and dance people and stand up comedians. I’ve compiled a youtube playlist of some of my favourite variety acts. These are people who have dedicated their lives  to perfecting something with absolutely no practical use for the sole purpose of entertaining a crowd for a brief few minutes. These are my kind of people.

The Greatest Variety Show on Earth

Immediately you disagree with me, and that’s fine. Young kid finds out he’s the chosen one and sets off on a quest to rescue the princess and destroy the object of power and thwart the evil overlord is hardly a groundbreaking narrative. It’s the monomyth in a green tunic. This isn’t the story I’m talking about, that’s all just context. I’m talking about STORY.

NEED

I’ve been writing screenplays for the past few years, and one of the things I’ve become increasingly nerdy about is structure, the architecture of a story. I’ve cycled through a bunch of different methods over the past few years; the beat sheet, the three act structure, the sequence method, but there’s one in particular that really chimed with me, Dan Harmon’s story circle.

GO

I was originally turned onto this through a Wired interview with Harmon late last year, I dug back through the channel 101 wiki and found Harmon’s original posts breaking down the story circle. If you’re an aspiring writer or have any interest in word science I urge you to do the same, it’s perfect.

1.YOU 2.NEED 3.GO 4.SEARCH 5.FIND 6.TAKE 7.RETURN 8.CHANGE.

SEARCH

I spoke to the Dr. Frankenstein of TV/Gaming convergence Mark Sorrell about this a few months back, and he wrote a great blog about how we should be using algorithms like Harmon’s to generate stories on the fly in game, creating stories that can adapt organically to the whims of the user. I’m excited by this idea, but it’s the future, and I worry that just like space colonisation and jetpacks, my body will have withered and died before we get there.

FIND

So what about now? Is it useful to even try? Stories and games are almost intrinsically opposed artforms, interactive versus passive. Games are things I interact with, so they immediately become my story. By trying to layer another story on top of that you’re just getting in the way.

Even the most lauded narrative games fall into this dissonant trap:

Nathan Drake may be a likable wisecracking hero during the cut scenes, but between the flirting and the snappy banter, I brutally murder literally hundreds of people.

Niko Bellic may be a tortured soul living out the American Nightmare, but my Niko likes to base jump and and set up trucks so I can do stunt jumps in my golf cart. (I also murder hundreds of people.)

Even Mass Effect with it’s expansive set of moral choices does’t really effect the story at all. No matter how much of a dick my Shepherd may be, I’m still going to save the world.

TAKE

As soon as I take control of the character, then the story of the game is my story. Cutscenes will continue to be skipped, ingame emotional moments will be ruined by me careening about the closed set, and when Dom’s wife dies, I will make a cup of tea until I’m allowed to shoot aliens again. There’s no hope.

RETURN

“Hey! Listen!” Zelda though, man. Zelda nailed it years ago. When I say Zelda, I’m referring to pretty much every version of the game since they’ve all had the same basic structure from the start. Some people seem to see this as lazy, but the structure is one of the master strokes, and the reason that Zelda is the greatest videogame story. Why?

You – Link

Need – To save Princess Zelda

Go – Out into the overworld

Serach – Adapt to the various enemies and traps around you

Find – you need a specific item to continue

Take – You need to make your way through Dungeons to get it

Return – You get the objects you need

Change – You are now able to rescue the princess

Granted, you could apply this structure to most narrative games (it is STORY after all.) What’s key about Zelda though, is that the story circle isn’t just a grand narrative laid over the top of the game, it is the structure of the game itself. Dungeon to dungeon.

You – Link

Need – The hookshot

Go – To the Dungeon

Search – Find your way around this new, alien environment

Find – The hookshot! Da-da-da-daaaa!

Take – The only way out is through the boss

Return – You defeat the boss and emerge to the overworld

Change – But now you have a hookshot, and suddenly you have a whole new way to play in the world.

CHANGE

The change is key here I think, because it’s not some faux emotional moment presented in a cut scene. It’s a change in me as a player. After every dungeon I have a new item and a new skill I can use to play the game in a different way. Now I have the hookshot maybe I can get that heart piece I saw back in Kakariko village? Or help the old lady rescue her sheep? It literally changes the world.

I realise talking about how great Zelda games are isn’t exactly cutting edge, but man, how great are Zelda games?

I had to see Declan Dineen Lies for Money, not least because I found the title of his show refreshingly honest in a festival where every show is, it seems, ‘five stars’, ‘unmissable’ or just ‘brilliant’. Declan describes himself as ‘a magician, writer and all around good guy’ and I spoke with him before his show. When you learn his early inspirations were James Randi, the American mathematician and science writer Martin Gardiner and cult magic de-bunkers Penn & Teller you understand where his show gets it edge from. Declan first performs then deconstructs a series of card and other tricks, alongside a narrative demonstrating how easy it can be to get taken in by charlatans. Part of Declan Dineen’s charm for me was the recognition that, intelligent as we all might like to think ourselves, few of us are truly immune from some sense of wonder or mystery at the seemingly inexplicable. The other part of his charm is that, having explained the trick, you still can’t help but admire the skill with which he performed it.

One point in the show involves writing compliments on pieces of card and putting them in a jar. I won’t spoil the fun and explain why. After the show, Declan stands by the exit and holds the jar, offering to exchange a compliment card for some of your cash. Even if you think you’re being fleeced, you still leave the show feeling good about yourself.

Full review here. Big thanks to the Skeptic mag for coming along to chat with me, and to Edinburgh Skeptics to inviting me along in the first place.

Stay gold.

Here’s the set-up. My show at the 2011 Edinburgh Fringe was largely autobiographical. It was about what it’s like being a magician in the 21st century. It was smart, self aware, and full of neat tricks. One of the bits was about how badly things can go wrong when you’re working a room. When you first start out, you’re so keen to impress whoever has hired you that you eagerly approach every table in the hope of giving them some unforgettable magic moment. What you only learn with experience is that there are certain tables that simply DNGAF about your tricks. This is totally fine, but it’s a lesson learned the hard way.

To illustrate this at the show, I needed insults.

I had a group of people on stage to simulate the close up atmosphere and the intention was to create a really bad moment for a close up magician. The moment when you approach a table all charm and smiles only to be shot down with a horrific, soul crushing insult. To make sure people really took there time with this, I decided to get everyone in the crowd to write down an insult before the show began, totally anonymously. Imagine you finally get to say that thing you always wanted to say to that person you’ve always wanted to say it to. Treat it as therapy. At the appropriate moment in the show, I would approach the group on stage, one of them would reach into the glass filled with insults, pull one out at random, look me dead in the eyes and read it. It was a really fun bit to do.

NB: It wasn’t all negativity. To counterbalance the insults I also asked everyone to write down the nicest, kindest compliment they could think of. These were then handed out at random as people were leaving, so everybody got a random compliment from a total stranger. You might be boaking at the thought, but I loved it.

Anyway, I’ve created a set of some of the insults on flickr here if you want to puruse them, but I wanted to share some of the more notable ones here too.

Firstly, the bizarre. I’m not entirely sure where the inspiration for these came from.

I wonder what the life experience of the person writing this was. Who has the image of a cow pissing in the garden ready made in their head? Why is that a bad thing?

This was the only image I got from the 300 or entries I received. I guess I’m not the only one who’s had terrifying dreams about a Jewish Vampire Hitler.

Now, since the show was in the afternoon, there were a few occasions where some young kids would be in attendance with their parents, which could account for the absurdity and gentleness of some of the insults. This, for instance. The bogie monster. It’s cute, it’s exactly what you’d imagine a 6  year old boy or girl to write. Of course, not everyone in the crowd was quite as gentle with their insults which did cause some slightly awkward moments when the time came for an audience member to choose an insult.

I have to admit to having a certain amount of joy when an audience member pulled out an insult, looked at the 6 year old kid in the second row then looked at me, panicked before finally reading aloud :

The parents usually laughed it off and the kids thought it was brilliant, totally as it should be. There were very few occasions when the insult felt like it was too much, although going through the pile yesterday I noticed at least 3 different compliments. Maybe the people just didn’t have enough hatred and bile in their system to write something truly insulting, or they got confused, and there were a few people who left the show thinking they had a wonderful compliment from a stranger only to discover their paper said, You are a donkey’s cunt. If you are one of those people, I’m sorry. You are not a donkey’s cunt. You are a victim of someone else’s stupidity.

In fact, cunt was perhaps the most commonly used word in the insults, and after a while it loses some of its magical powers. Even the wealth of terminal illness insults like, ‘Your face has AIDS’ or ‘Your worse than Cancer.’ (sic) failed to shock after a while.  There were only a handful that really pushed it, that really gave you that pit of the stomach feeling.

These were the type of insults that hush a room, the type of insult that,  if I were back in school and someone said it, one of the snickering kids in the background would be all, ‘Aww, that’s tight man, you can’t say that. That’s well tight.’

The insult?

That’s tight man, that’s well tight.

It’s an addendum to the point I had raised earlier in the evening to the way in which magic started to permeate my life in ways I never imagined. Firstly in terms of relationships (you’ll have to come to the show to see that) and secondly in terms of movies.

As a magician, you learn how to misdirect. It’s fundamental to deception. As such, I found myself rewatching old movies and forcibly trying not be be led by the director, to try and take in the whole image instead of follow the action. It’s a terrible flaw, and one that has since ruined some of my favourite movies.

Take North by Northwest for example, a Hitchcockian classic, a thriller from the master of tension. Watching it more recently however, the tension and drama of the scene is sucked out immediately by a small kid in the background. Take a look:

North by Northwest

A more infamous example can be discovered in this short clip from the end of Back to the Future 3.

BTTF3

So now you know the kind of stuff you’re looking for, watch the first 25 seconds of the following clip and pause it. The gaff has already happened, but see if you can spot what it is.

Bad Boys

Now watch the end of the video, and you’ll see the problem highlighted. I think you’ll be surprised.

symftr:

Excerpt from “How To Play In Traffic”, Penn Jillette and Teller, 1997 (out of print). This is long, but for my money, it’s the best thing about the space shuttle ever written.

Buddy Hackett said, “Ask me what’s the secret of comedy.”

Johnny Carson started to say, “What’s the secret of. …..

Madeon - Pop Culture (live mashup) (by itsmadeon)

Reggie Watts on Conan (by Hambone75891)